Title: Palm Tree Huts

Summary: Set in very early season one. A bad day, a few life lessons, and some unlikely answers.

Category: Hm, I’m not sure. It is what it is.

Rating: PG for, as usual, John’s colorful metaphors.

Spoilers: Set in very early season one. No spoilers, really. Well, maybe a small one for Rhapsody in Blue.

Disclaimer: None of them belong to me. John, Aeryn, and their wacky universe belong to Henson and partners. The space program belongs to the US government. Corvette belongs to Chevrolet. And anyone who wants the planet can have it. No money made, no infringement intended.

Notes: This is a bit of a departure for me, stylistically, so I hope you enjoy it. It was sure fun to go back and play with characters from season one, though! Thanks to Jill and Sabine for beta-reading and feedback. And big thanks to Nick at Kennedy Space Center for bringing astronaut history to life.

****************************************************************************

The planet, as usual, was a dump. With depressingly few exceptions, the others had been dumps, too. In my so-far stellar three-week tour of the Uncharted Territories, I'd already learned a few important things. One is that Star Trek was way off the mark -- the universe isn't inhabited with healtthy, civilized worlds with nice, friendly, humanoid people looking to share feelings and women. Most of them are the galactic equivalent of a trailer park in Butthole, Arizona.

This one was worse than usual, though. Particularly smelly and dank. Dripping with orange-yellow pollution that clung to the surface in a persistent fog. It was a Commerce Planet, which is almost always a used-up planet covered with a giant alien swap meet. This one was variations on a theme. That theme was brown -- brown sky, brown dirt, brown buildings, brown oceans. Not a nice chocolate brown but a sad rusty brown, painted by the grime that colored our shoes and our hands, and probably our lungs.

I really do think that if the planet hadn't been such a colossal dump, it might not have gotten to me that day. If I hadn't been stuck there with no money and nothing worth buying, it might have been okay. If I hadn't ended up killing time sitting on a stool between Ugly Guy Selling Chia Pets and Lizard Selling Rotten Purple Fruit on this landfill of a planet in three-week old shorts with no idea what I was supposed to do next, it might have been okay.

If I hadn't remembered the car.

Looking back, I'm pretty sure it was the car that did it that day. I mean, I'm usually a glass-half-full kinda guy, you know? So I was doing pretty well considering the massive hole my life had fallen down. At least I thought I was, but then there was the car. The proverbial straw.

Granted, it came on top of a lot of other garbage that day.

It hadn't started on that grungy planet -- it had started the second I opened my eyes that morning and remembered where I was. For a long time in the beginning, it hit me every morning. A singular moment of panic in those first seconds of waking up when the reality of being stuck out here smacked me upside the head again. I did what I had done for the previous 22 mornings -- closed my eyes, took a deep breath, counted to ten, and tried to remember that I was still alive and what a great plus that was.

But that morning, as I talked myself down and rolled out of bed, boom -- there it was. This silent yellow robotic DRD staring right at me with its beady little bug eyes. Two inscrutable little alien antennae curled up and the thing rolled forward just a little when I noticed it, and I know for a fact that it had been watching me while I was sleeping. Studying me. Now, I'm still not entirely clear on what in God's name this thing is -- is it a machine, is it Moya, is it Pilot, is it a separate being? what? -- so I sure as hell didn't appreciate it staring at me in the middle of the night and thinking its own little alien thoughts. Like, gee, I wonder how Crichton would taste on shish-ka-bob?

I just find it damn hard to trust something when I can't even see its eyes. Call me crazy.

But then, everyone does.

So, the DRD didn't help, but I probably still would have been all right if the rest of the day had gone okay. But that was followed by the laundry thing. I mean, a man can only wash his shorts out in the sink so many times before it really starts to get to him, right? Am I crazy? Around here, you'd think I was. You'd think that pointing out that I've been wearing the same goddamn underwear for how-many-freaking-weeks-now wouldn't be just some pathetic human whining, right? You'd be wrong.

Then there was breakfast. That's a whole 'nother ball of wax, believe me. So all right, it could have been the laundry thing. Or the food thing. Or the company I was keeping. It wasn't like any of them were a walk in the park.

It could definitely have been Aeryn.

"Like hell you're touching it!"

On my simple hunt for breakfast, I made my second mistake of the day. I'd apparently left the comfort of my own private jail cell to come up to Celebrity Deathmatch starring Aeryn and D'Argo. Standing on opposite sides of the center chamber table, staring each other down like two strays arguing over the same garbage can. And the food -- as we'll generously refer to it -- was trapped smack-dab in between them. Just my luck.

And I won't even point out that the DRD had followed me up here and was still watching me.

"You need the help," D'Argo rumbled imperiously, arms folded in a universal gesture of finality. "You admit you have no idea how to repair that Prowler. And we need it for defense."

Ah, the Prowler. Some scout ship from the Peacekeepers had done a job on it a couple of days earlier, before being reduced to little bits of Uncharted Flotsam and Jetsam. Aeryn had done a great job out there, buying us enough time to get out of that planet's gravity far enough to Starburst, then tucking in close to ride the wave with us. But the Prowler had taken some serious dings and was chugging bad by the time she got it back inside. That had pissed her off. She hadn't let anyone near it since then. And D'Argo had apparently gotten tired of waiting. D'Argo's not the best at waiting.

But, then again, around here, who is?

"I said I'll fix it." She carefully enunciated every syllable in that accent of hers, following it up with one long finger pointed across the table in D'Argo's direction. "And you're not touching it." How is it that woman can argue with such... determination... first thing in the morning when she hasn't even had any coffee? That's the eternal question. How does she stay so anal -- and so loud -- without a double espresso in her system?

"Oh, and we're just supposed to sit around while it rots. In case you hadn't noticed, that thing is our only defensive weapon."

"That 'thing' belongs to me, which means that your only weapon is here at my pleasure." She leaned over the table toward D'Argo, and I swear she was getting off on this. "And that means that when and how it's repaired -- and by whom -- is my decision. Alone." With a final flourish, she popped a food cube in her mouth.

D'Argo glared at her in return. He glared for a full five Mississippis. I counted.

"Then do it. Before I lose patience and do it my way. With or without your permission," he leaned over the table, in the same exact way she had just done, "Peacekeeper."

And he stalked off, shoving past me in the doorway. I think Luxans are taught how to make an exit in preschool or something. Aeryn popped another green cube in her mouth as he did so, probably straight out of the Peacekeeper Act of Defiance Textbook, Article Seventeen, Paragraph Twenty-Two. I don't know what it was supposed to accomplish since he was walking the opposite direction, but I knew better than to ask. I like my ass, thank you very much, and kinda wanted to keep it intact.

"What do you want?"

Great. She had turned on me now.

"What do I want?" No, lady, I thought, you do not want to go there today. "I'll tell you what I want. I want to get up in the morning somewhere other than center stage Beirut. I want a Starbucks around the corner. I want steak and eggs served by a perky blonde waitress named Holly. I want to hop in my car and drive to work up the coast with the sun just barely rising over the Atlantic. That's what I want."

She tsked and rolled her dark, haughty eyes. "Ugh. Humans."

And she stalked off, too.

'Humans.' Like she knew any. Like she knew anything about my people. Like she knew anything about how we feel and what we love and why we hate and who the hell we even are. And she just threw it around in that arrogant, I'm-the-All-Wise-Peacekeeper way.

Ugh. Peacekeepers.

Fortunately, once she left, breakfast was uneventful. At least, I'm gonna call it breakfast. It's usually the same meal – food cubes -- no matter what time of day it is. In fact, I'm not even sure it was morning. Nothing really changes in this place. No day and night, no summer and winter, no clocks to mark time passing. The tiny digital clock in the module still obediently kept Greenwich Mean Time, but fat lot of good that did me here. And Moya's no help -- she doesn't even seem to understand the idea of a circadian rhythm. So my body, which to this day hasn't fully grasped the Uncharted Territories Time Zones, had no idea which way was up.

With breakfast accomplished, I headed out for the maintenance bay. Got lost twice trying to find it, too, but was at least saved the humiliation of having to call for help because the damn DRD shadowing me seemed to know where it was going. Fine, at least I'd found a purpose for having Twiki around.

Aeryn was half-visible under the hood of the Prowler when I got there. She didn't even pop her head up to acknowledge me, so I didn't her either. I didn't care -- I'd found the one thing in this whole nutfarm that's mine. The one thing I could understand. The one thing that was still there for me. My one ticket home.

My module.

My module. My built-by-the-lowest-bidder, black-and-white Buck-Rogers module. Farscape One was a great name for it. I admit it wasn't mine. I’d voted for ‘Betty’, but DK was drunk on celebratory whiskey and feeling kind of poetic. He's not usually a poetic guy, but he has his moments. And it was a great choice. Farscape One needed a poetic name, because for all its hardware and schematics and computers, it's a beauty. It's beautiful to watch, sensual to sit at the stick of, and a kick and a half to fly. It's my baby.

So screw the others, I'd just stay here with her. Some people have comfort food. I’ve got comfort vehicles. Dad’s old Ford pickup. The T-Bird. A T-38 trainer. That damn 'vette…

Something clanged against the Prowler. It clanged in that way that anyone who has ever worked on an engine knows is a particularly unproductive clang.

"Hey, there. Need some help?"

Now, see, I thought that was good -- nice and helpful, light on the sarcasm, heavy on the sincerity. I guess Aeryn thought otherwise, though -- her response was the wrench-type thing that had probably made the clanging noise being hurled through the air in my general direction. Not a bad blind shot, actually. It banged against the module's nose and was followed by an inarticulate curse the microbes didn't translate for me.

"Great. PMS, Peacekeeper style."

Her head popped up from around the Prowler, wearing that Sigourney Weaver kind of pissed-off face. "What the frell is that supposed to mean?"

It meant I'd had enough of her. Enough of her and D'Argo and that damn DRD and the freaking brown walls and the godawful food cubes and His Royal Pissiness and the whole damn universe, in fact. "It means you've been goose-stepping around here for days pissing people off, Officer Sun, and I'm sick of it. Lighten. Up."

"I will not 'lighten up.' I'm trying to keep you ingrates alive, and everyone is just getting in my way. If you people would just leave me alone, we'd all be better off."

"You want to talk about ungrateful? You've got balls, lady. In case you'd forgotten, you're alive because of me in the first place."

"I'm here because of you, in the first place."

God, not that again. Three weeks, and already I couldn't count the number of times she'd played that card. I can take blame when it's deserved. But I was getting sick and tired of being accused of screwing up things that I hadn't screwed up. "No, you're here because of you, in the first place. You chose to say something, so don't go blaming that on me."

She took a deep, preparatory breath, and I knew for a fact that she was about to get the argument she'd been looking for all morning. Fine. No one had ever accused John Crichton of not being able to give as good as he got…

But that was exactly when D'Argo demonstrated his incredible talent for good timing. Not good manners, but I'll take what I can get sometimes. His voice boomed out of my lapel, startling me out of my anger. "We've found a Commerce Planet. Be ready." Short, succinct, to the point.

Aeryn snorted and shouldered her way past me as she left. She didn't have to -- there was plenty of space in the bay. She was just marking her territory. Showing me who was boss.

It was gonna be a hell of a day.

**********************************************

Once on the surface, Aeryn and D'Argo argued over how long we were gonna be there and then stormed off in opposite directions, thick dust flying. Rygel was salivating, looking like he was getting a Hynerian Hard-On just from the idea of all this shopping. Zhaan hadn't even deigned to come down and look.

Me? I wasn’t even sure why I’d bothered to come down at all. I didn't know what anything was for, and I really couldn't have cared less. Unless one of those vendors could conjure up a wormhole in the next hour, none of them had anything I needed. And what they did have, I didn't want.

So I just concentrated on not getting lost.

The only stall that even caught my attention was one that sold clothes. Clothes were one thing I could have used. I was getting fairly ripe. I even had something I could barter with. The few valuable bits and pieces I'd been able to scrounge off the module were stuffed in my pocket, and I debated going over to see what clothes Fat and Four-Armed had up for sale.

But, ultimately, I didn't. Because it would have been an admission of defeat. Buying supplies for myself was admitting that this three-hour-tour wasn't going to be over any time soon, and that I really should start building a palm-tree hut and hoping a redhead in an evening gown would wander by.

The real problem, though, was that that was exactly what had already happened. I knew it. With or without a palm-tree hut, I was already Robinson Crusoe in space. Stuck. Trapped. Lost. And there was squat that I could do about it at that point. And I was getting more and more pissed about that every second. Had been all day.

You can imagine, then, why it was really bad timing to have discovered I was standing next to a bar.

I guess it was no surprise there was a bar there -- any place with that many people spending money would definitely have a place to get them drunk. And, while it wasn't much -- a few stools and one long counter tucked in between Large and Ugly Selling Chia Pets and Cold-Blooded and Fork-Tongued Selling Stinky Fruit -- my first alien bar suited my needs just fine.

The seven-foot-tall bartender looked over my small collection of Farscape One keychains with little interest. It had been DK's idea to bring them along in the module. He always was the salesman in our little partnership. Take them into space, he'd said -- it'll make them valuable. Or at least impress women. What the hell, I’d figured -- I was far from the first guy to take non-IASA-approved souvenirs up for his own nefarious purposes.

Not that this was the intended purpose. Far from impressing women, they were barely enough to buy me a hangover. The bartender unhappily took three for every shot he filled with the most hideous alcoholic substance I've ever had the bad luck to get drunk on.

I drank. And I got pissed. A little more with every shot.

This was what my life had come to. How pathetic. A month ago, I'd had a plan. I had a project, a career, friends who didn't yell at each other every freakin' morning over breakfast. I had a car, for God's sake. I wasn't on anyone's Most Wanted List, I had a closet full of flannel shirts and well-worn jeans, and there was a long list of people I could call if I even got the slightest bit bored on a Saturday night. Now I was sitting at an alien bar in a planet-wide dump, drinking bathtub moonshine traded for souvenir keychains -- my entire goal in life to get drunk enough to forget I was sitting at an alien bar in a planet-wide dump, drinking bathtub moonshine traded for souvenir keychains. I had, literally, nothing. Zippo. Not even underwear.

And I was rapidly running out of keychains, too. But it was the damn keychains that got me thinking about the day I left. About DK and my dad and the shuttle and driving out to my favorite spot as the sun came up over the launch pad. And that led to thinking about the car.

That goddamn car...

"Crichton!" The sound of my name in that alien place startled me. Having it bellowed across the clearing when I was just beginning to enjoy a good buzz annoyed the hell out of me. Aeryn was looking over the small bar and its collection of low-lifes with open disgust. Clearly, Miss Bug-Up-Her-Ass hadn't ever sat where I was. "I've been calling you on the comms." She looked down her nose at me like Mrs. Beard had in fourth grade when I got caught reading comics instead of textbooks. "There's nothing useful on this planet. We're leaving."

I may not have been able to tell off Mrs. Beard, but Aeryn Sun was another thing entirely. "You know, I've about had it with you people ordering me around. Have you ever considered actually asking me a question? How about 'are you done yet?' 'Do you think another five minutes would do?' 'Ready to blow this dump?' Questions, Aeryn. It's called 'being considerate'."

"Very well, then," she folded her arms and rolled her eyes with a melodramatic tsk. "Are you done sulking?"

"I am not sulking. Men don't sulk. Women... women sulk. But not men. Men con-tem-plate."

Another well-honed tsk. "Trust me -- I have known enough brats in my life to recognize sulking when I see it. Are you done?"

"Excuse me? Did you... did you just call me a brat? You have got a hell of a lot of nerve, calling me a brat. Physician, heal thyself. You've been throwing tantrums for days now, pushing your weight around, and biting the heads off of anyone who has the stupidity to come near you. And you accuse me of being a brat?"

"Yes. A brat. At least I'm doing something to help us survive. You've been wandering around the ship, comparing every single thing to what your backward little planet is like, feeling sorry for yourself, and doing nothing -- absolutely nothing -- useful to help out."

"What, I'm like supposed to be Superman now? I'm supposed to wake up one day half a gazillion light years from home on the HMS Bounty and be happy about it all the time? Say, well, gee, it wasn't like I had a life back there, it wasn't like I had friends, a job, family, astronaut groupies for cryin' out loud. Hell, I'll just hop right on board and make your days all happy-happy joy-joy. Well, I...am...so...sorry...for depressing the hell out of you with my insignificant little problems."

"Oh, please." She turned in the direction of Tarantula Selling Used Parts, braid flinging around behind her. "You're such a frelling baby. If you're not done sulking, fine. Just say so."

"I'm not sulking, all right? I was thinking about the car."

"The what?"

"Car. A 1968 Corvette, actually, in great condition. Original upholstery, original paint. New engine, though. Fuzzy dice hanging on the mirror. See, during the Apollo project, all the astronauts kept getting these sweet little Corvettes from the local dealer. They were speed freaks, rocket jockeys, original Top Gun-types, you know?" But she clearly didn't know. Oh, well, that's my life story these days. "On the ground, the closest they could come to sitting on the back of a rocket was a hotrod. So they brought out these Corvettes and drag-raced around the Cape when the adrenaline and fear got to be too much to stand still a minute longer. This was Armstrong's car. My dad always told me about how he and Armstrong snuck out the night before Apollo 11 got quarantined, and they drove his 'vette out across the water from that big ol' Saturn Five. They sat in this very car staring at the tiny little capsule strapped on top of 40 stories of rocket fuel and thought about how everything we ever knew about being human was going to change once that went up. Then before my dad went up, Armstrong loaned him that car -- said it had brought him good luck."

God, I don't know how many times I heard that story. It was one of my favorites when I was a kid. And Dad knew just how to tell it so that I got goose bumps every time. About the moon hanging large over the pad (which it probably wasn't), and the floodlights shining on the rocket (which probably did), and their clandestine jailbreak from the Cape (which probably wasn't as difficult as his version), and Armstrong mulling over what he was gonna say when he climbed out onto the moon (which had already been scripted). But I still loved to hear Dad tell it.

I tossed back my interrupted shot. There were no moons hanging large over launch pads here, no floodlit rockets against the night sky, no heroic astronauts, no stirring speeches, no boldly going where no man has gone before. I wasn't standing on a bleacher seat on a perfectly clear day using Pete Conrad's borrowed binoculars to watch my dad's capsule disappear into space. I didn't harbor those childish illusions any more about how grand space was. About adventures and making history and wild frontiers.

There was only pollution, smoke and an unidentifiable hovering stench. Homicidal aliens, escaped prisoners, and cubes of only vaguely food-like substances. Hiding from Peacekeepers, hoping my shipmates didn't decide to kill me in my sleep, and scrounging things off the module to barter with.

Space sure as hell wasn't what it was cracked up to be.

"Where was he going?"

"Huh?" I winced at the tinny aftertaste of whatever I was drinking. "Oh, um, the moon."

"A moon," Aeryn repeated, with that unimpressed tinge to her voice I've come to know and love.

"No, not a moon. The moon. You gotta understand that we'd never been to any other planet. This was a big thing. Huge."

She eyed some big guy walking drunkenly through the clearing, fingering her gun. Like she couldn't even have the decency to listen to me spill my inebriated guts. "It's a moon, Crichton."

Oh, that was it. That was exactly what I was talking about. That 'stupid, backward human' attitude. Every single day, from every single corner -- it gets to a guy, you know?

"You know what, forget it. You'll never get it." I turned away from her and signaled Lurch for another fill-up. "I don't even know why I try."

In my peripheral vision, I saw her come a step or two closer behind me. "Well, you're the one who brought up this pointless story about this 'car.' Don't blame me for not having any idea -- as usual -- what the frell you're talking about."

God, she was impossible. "It's not a pointless story." I watched my glass get refilled from some kind of long hose. I hadn't asked what it was; didn't really want to know. "Something about this mission wasn't sitting right with me, so my dad borrowed that car a couple weeks before. He had it waiting at Canaveral when I got there. Said it had always helped him settle the rattlers."

"'Rattlers?'"

I ignored her. Wasn't worth the trouble to explain. Besides, Aeryn Sun had probably never had them. "But it was having trouble turning over the week before launch, and I didn't have time to work on it. So I took it down to Eddie's to fix it and told him I'd pick it up after I got back. Except I never got back. That was weeks ago. A month. And now I have no idea what's happened to Armstrong's Corvette."

She shifted her weight. "Is that what you're worried about -- a vehicle you were supposed to retrieve?"

I couldn't sit still any more, trying to explain this to the Sebacean Ice Queen, and had to move. I wandered vaguely towards Short and Eight-Legged Selling Machine Parts. Put some space between me and Aeryn's uncomprehending scowl. "Neil Armstrong's Corvette. It was part of something huge. Heroic. And it shouldn't be sitting in somebody's garage thinking it was abandoned."

"It's a machine. It doesn't think anything. If you're feeling lonely and homesick, just admit it. Don't blame it on some inanimate object."

"Fine. I'm feeling lonely and homesick. That better? My life got sucked down that wormhole and I was Not. Freakin'. Done. With it! And I'd just like someone -- one stinking person -- to quit giving me hell about that."

"Oh, you do, do you? Well poor John Crichton, stuck here with us. How very sad for you. You're certainly the only one around here who's lost anything."

Man, that woman knows how to deflate anything. Even some good old-fashioned righteous indignation. "I'm not saying that, it's just .... Hell, at least this is you guys' part of the universe. I don't even have a fresh pair of underwear."

"Let's get one thing straight." She advanced on me, and I suddenly realized I'd struck a nerve. "This is not 'my part of the universe'. 'My part of the universe' is currently trying to hunt us down and kill us. I have never lived anywhere but on a Peacekeeper ship. I fly Prowlers. That's what I do. And now I'm stuck babysitting a bunch of criminals and one selfish brat of a human. I don't even have any way to prevent my Prowler from rusting in the maintenance bay because there are no techs to fix it -- and there aren't any parts even if there were techs. So, maybe if no one has been giving you a break, it's because you haven't been giving anyone else one either."

Close enough now, she stuck one finger in my face. "You know, I don't know this Neil Armstrong person, but it seems to me that if all you can do is sit around feeling sorry for yourself, then maybe you don't deserve his 'car'. Maybe it's better off without you."

It was the longest speech I'd heard out of her since I got here. And damned if she hadn't made me feel about three inches high. My buzz had disappeared somewhere between 'selfish brat' and 'feeling sorry for yourself'.

"And maybe," I stuck my finger back in her general direction, "the Prowler is better off rusting in that hangar than with someone who gives up at the first sign of having trouble taking care of it."

She blinked back at me, actually surprised -- maybe that the pathetic human had a point? For the first time, I saw the chinks in the Peacekeeper armor. The all-wise, all-tough Aeryn Sun had gotten blindsided. All big eyes and furrowed eyebrows, she stood there for what seemed like forever. Drunks and aliens brushed unnoticed past us. Then, without another word, she turned and went back the direction she'd come.

Screw her, she was wrong. I did deserve Neil Armstrong's Corvette. I'd made it this far. Weeks now. Crappy days and all. I hadn't gone crazy. I'd even saved our collective asses once or twice. Neil couldn't have done better himself. My dad couldn't have done better. So screw her. And I was gonna prove that she was wrong, too -- I was not going to go crazy, and I was not going to give up. I was gonna survive until I got home.

She didn't know what humans are made of. And I was gonna show her. If only to piss her off.

Which meant that I had to start by doing something other than trying to get drunk in an alien dive. I tossed my last keychain to the bartender and headed back they way I'd come. I hoped. It was time I started building my palm-tree hut.

I'd backtracked what seemed like half the planet before I found it. Tucked in between One-Armed Guy Selling Carcasses and Bug Selling Vinyl Purses. Large and Leathery Selling Clothes. Now, I'd be the first to admit they weren't exactly Armani. But they were clothes. And what'd'ya know? I needed clothes.

"Can I help you?"

Like most everyone else I've met out here, she wasn't the most attractive star in the galaxy. Of course, the extra limbs and heads always throw me off. It's still occasionally hard to hold down a conversation with Zaphod Beeblebrox, even after this much time.

"Uh, yeah, I need clothes. Badly."

Way to put your cards on the table, John.

"Well, then, you've come to the right place." Her left head eyed me up and down, kinda the way a supermodel looks at a bag lady. "What are you interested in?"

"I'm not too picky -- anything with one neck, two arms, and two legs would be great."

"Well, we don't get many bipeds around here." She deftly rooted through her selection with all four hands for a minute. Everything she had was either big enough for D'Argo, had two neckholes, three or four armholes, or was made for the Munchkins. "I could make you up something in just a few microts if you'd like."

"Yes, I'd like."

"You got currency?" she asked suspiciously.

I started to ask if I looked like the kind of guy who had no money, but I quickly realized that I didn't want her to answer that. "I’ve got something." I fished my few remaining valuables out of my pocket and offered the handful of computer parts and precious metals I’d pried off the module.

She clicked and tsked and poked one long, clawed finger through the pile. Through the piddling detritus of my interrupted life. "That's not gonna be hardly enough for a set of specially-made clothing, my Sebacean friend." She grinned a toothy, disturbing grin and waggled both sets of eyebrows. "I'm not a cheap woman, you know."

Great. Double entendres from a two-headed reptile in retail.

"Okay, change of plans. How about one thing?"

She nodded reluctantly, eyeing the pile again.

One thing, I thought. What did I need the most?

**********************************************

"Are...you...ready...to...leave?"

Aeryn's snide remark was the only thing I could even remotely call a greeting when I got back to the transport pod. Just another reminder that I sure as hell wasn't on the Love Boat here.

"See? Politeness," I responded, determined to encourage even lame attempts at manners around here. "That wasn't so hard."

She snorted. She was efficiently handing off small crates full of something up the stairs to D'Argo, who was standing just inside the pod's doorway. But, even with the sarcasm, I could tell she was in a decidedly better mood. It's hard to tell with Aeryn, I know, but there were some signs. She fingered her gun less, there were fewer lines between her eyes, the perpetual frown lessened. You gotta pay attention around Aeryn Sun if you're gonna catch the subtleties.

"What's gotten into you?" I asked.

She lifted another crate off the floor and gestured loosely with it. "Parts to repair the Prowler." It was stuffed into the pod and followed by another.

"You still haven't got a tech."

"Perhaps." She handed off a crate. "But I figure that if you can repair that primitive module of yours, we can probably find a way to make my Prowler work."

I smiled. "So, you found what you were looking for."

"I did." Grunting just a little as she hefted the next, she stopped mid-carry and gave me a tiny smile. It was long overdue and not at all unwelcome. "It seems I wasn't looking hard enough. What about you?"

"Me? Well, yes and no. I did find something that I think will tide me over for a while." I held my hand out, loving being the giver of confusion instead of the receiving end for once. "Shorts."

Not exactly off-the-rack Calvin Kleins, but pretty darn close for the Uncharted Territories. Four-arms had done really good on copying mine, even if I did have to stand commando in the back of her stall for half an hour while she figured them out. Half an arn, whatever. Six pairs of brand-spanking-new boxer shorts.

Heaven.

"'Shorts.'"

"Underwear. Boxers. See, me being in a crappy mood hasn't been because I'm playing Lost in Space with you people -- nope, I just needed fresh underwear. You have no idea how much a clean, new pair of shorts can change a man's life."

"These?" She fingered them, suspicious and maybe a little curious. "That is what you bought?"

"This is what I bought. And don't knock it until you've tried it. Trust me, fresh underwear makes anything better."

"Underwear," she repeated skeptically. She stared a few more seconds, then looked up at me, baffled.

"It's not a palm-tree hut, but it's a start." I laughed, for once amused that I was the only who was gonna get the joke.

She frowned at me one more time before getting back to business. That's the way we do it here.

The really strange thing that day was that I could have sworn I paid that woman for six copies of my Calvin Kleins, but I only found five when I got back to Moya. I never have figured out exactly where that sixth pair of shorts went, but I have my suspicions.

Because every once in a while, Aeryn seems to be in a much better mood in the morning.

**************************

~~finis~~