Retun to Bermudas Index
Midnight Musings…..
Reunion: Epilogue
It had been a very long day, after Jack Crichton agreed to keep their secret and DK had gone back to work. The first order of business had been to find John some chocolate – fortunately, his father had a stash of Hershey bars in the kitchen, and John ate three before he even offered a piece to Aeryn. She had to admit, it was a flavor she could learn to like quite a lot. Since they were going back to the Uncharted Territories in a solar day or two, it was probably better if she didn’t develop a taste for it!
By mutual agreement, it seemed, John and his father next moved on to finding a change of clothing for the two visitors. Jack’s jeans fit John decently enough for casual wear, with his own black T-shirt. Aeryn could see John go somewhere else, inside his memory, as he examined the results in a mirror….but he came back to himself quickly enough and smiled at her.
Aeryn was a little trickier. She was so much more slender than Jack, it made choosing from his wardrobe difficult. In the end they found a grey T-shirt for her to pull over her own leather pants. When she showed John the result, he looked at her for a minute, smiled at the contrast the floppy shirt made to her usual clothing style, and then knotted the shirt at the waist. Jack agreed the outfit would serve when they needed to go out in public.
Next, John and his father walked through the house together, Aeryn trailing behind. John looked at everything, commenting on what had changed and what hadn’t. He wasn’t always right simply because he hadn’t really paid that much attention in his old life to things that he found completely fascinating now, which amused his father. Still, they came up against one of John’s real memory gaps in Jack’s den. He stood looking at a posed photograph of his father in a spacesuit standing shaking hands with an older man in a suit. Aeryn could clearly see him struggling to remember who the other figure was, and he finally asked his father. Jack looked astonished and replied that it was President Nixon. John shrugged and said as nonchalantly as he could, “Alien abductions will do that to you….” Then he smiled wistfully at Aeryn.
After that, John and Jack settled into the family room to talk about Moya, their friends, and some of what had happened over the past four years, especially when he had first arrived in the UTs. While they talked, Aeryn wandered the house, half listening, half looking at photographs, knick-knacks, books, lamps, walls, floor coverings – everything that made this place different from any other she had been in, trying to picture John living in these surroundings. It wasn’t SO different, of course; over the past four cycles on Moya, they had been to a lot of unusual places. But the little details, the way the doors opened, light switches, fabrics – those WERE different. In some ways, it was terribly primitive compared to what she had grown up with, and where they lived now, on Moya. THIS was what John was used to, this was what he had lost – and why he himself had been so lost when he first ended up on Moya. Regretfully, she realized she’d hardly noticed at the time, she had been so lost herself – but when she thought about it now, the physical change from a command carrier to a Leviathan, especially one that had been used as a Peacekeeper prison ship, was so much less than what he’d had to deal with….
She shook herself out of her reverie when she heard Jack laughing. She went back to the family room and found John was telling a story about Rygel. That brought up the subject of food, and in the end they went out to get a meal of what John called “fast food” by going through the drive-through at a place called McDonald’s. Aeryn thought she’d heard him mention the name before. The meal smelled better than food cubes, anyway – and it WAS fast….
They had taken Jack’s truck to the restaurant, and on the way back to the house, they went to IASA to retrieve Jack’s other vehicle, having decided it was better to take the risk of being seen than to leave the car conspicuously overnight in the parking lot for several days. To minimize the chances of running into anyone who might find John’s face familiar, they dropped Jack off so he could walk into the lot to get the car. John and Aeryn parked the truck down the street from the gate and nibbled on French fries and burgers until Jack had driven back out of the lot. Then they followed him home with the remnants of lunch.
In the afternoon, John opened up and told his Dad the basics about Scorpius’ pursuit of him and his wormhole knowledge, the implanted chip and his descent into madness. This time Aeryn stayed in the family room with him, perched on the edge of the sofa. Nervous, John paced the room as he talked, looking up only occasionally to see how his father was taking the story. From time to time he stopped next to Aeryn and reached down to touch her arm, or her cheek. When he did, she smiled and touched his hand gently, lending comfort and the occasional additional comment. Jack listened stoically, for which John was grateful, particularly when explaining about Aeryn’s death and Zhaan’s sacrifice.
When John ran out of words, Jack suggested ordering in Chinese food for dinner, which suited everyone’s mood by then. John got back into the spirit of sharing Earth food with Aeryn, and the two of them giggled over a fortune which read, “Don’t try to meet trouble halfway. It goes faster than you do.” Over dinner they talked about some of the wonders they’d seen, and Jack asked a lot of questions about the planets they’d visited and the various kinds of ships that were in use in the Uncharted Territories. Moya and Talyn fascinated him, and Aeryn waxed uncharacteristically poetic about Talyn.
After dinner John needed a break from the UT’s, and Jack brought out the DVDs of the first Star Wars movies. John and Aeryn curled up on the sofa in the family room and watched “Episode IV: A New Hope,” with John explaining the bits that seemed totally ludicrous from the point of view of someone who really lived “far, far away.” Although the universe it was set in was nearly as alien to her as Earth itself, Aeryn ended up captivated by the story of the farm boy who became a hero by following his heart. John refrained from reminding her that Darth Vader was really Luke’s father (he was pretty sure he’d mentioned it at some point in the past four cycles, but he hoped she’d forgotten it – it was more fun if the revelation came as a surprise!), and, yawning, promised to show her the rest of the story before they left.
Now, finally, they were sharing the bed in Jack’s guest room, both in oversized T-shirts for sleep. John was sound asleep, exhausted emotionally, and feeling safe here in his father’s house. Before falling asleep, John had wrapped himself around her, and now Aeryn was lying there, wide awake, tangled up in his arms and legs, thinking and listening. All the little sounds the house made were so different from those of a ship like Moya. She had no idea what all the creaks and clicks and hums were, and although she assumed they were normal here, she couldn’t shut them out. Experience told her she wasn’t going to get to sleep any time soon. Experience also told her that John was very soundly asleep. The deep regularity of his breathing, the weight of his limbs, the fact that he didn’t even grunt when she poked him in the ribs, hard….yes, he was definitely going to be out for arns. She finally decided to get up and do some exploring.
Unwrapping herself gently from her husband’s unconscious embrace, Aeryn stood up in the dark and took stock of the situation. There was no point in getting dressed; the long T-shirt was comfortable and served for modesty, and she didn’t expect to see anyone anyway. There wasn’t anyone else besides Jack in the house, and he was surely asleep. She shook her hair out of her face and left it hanging loose as it was. She considered bringing her pulse pistol, but much to her own surprise, decided against it. The day spent with John’s father had given her a sense of security she hoped wasn’t misplaced. She padded downstairs in bare feet.
She realized quickly that there was a light on somewhere on the first level, making her rethink the pulse pistol issue briefly. She stood for a moment at the bottom of the stairs, getting her bearings, and realized the light was coming from Jack’s den. She couldn’t hear anything to indicate there was anyone else in the house, or that Jack was communicating with anyone outside the house, so she stuck to her original decision about the gun, and walked towards the light. At least the time might pass faster if she had someone to talk to.
From the “tour” earlier in the day, Aeryn remembered that the den was a comfortable, cluttered room, with a sofa and chair, a small television set, book shelves, and a lamp or two. This room was nearly overwhelmed with photographs, on the walls, on the bookshelves, on the end tables next to the sofa. Aeryn came up to the door quietly, just in case….
Jack was sitting on the sofa, a drink sitting apparently untouched at his side. The television set was on, but there was no sound coming from it, and Jack’s gaze seemed to be on the images on the wall above, rather than on the screen itself. Startled, he looked up when Aeryn appeared in the doorway.
“May I come in?” she asked quietly.
“Goodness, are you still awake?” He smiled at her wearily.
“John’s exhausted,” she said. “But I can’t seem to stop thinking.”
Jack nodded.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“More all right than not,” he said. “But what he’s been through….I don’t imagine he’s told me the half of it.”
“Probably not,” she agreed. “I know there are things he’s never told me. Even if he is the most talkative man in the Uncharted Territories,” she smiled ruefully. “But he’s all right, I think. He’s healing. I’m growing, and he’s healing.”
“You two make quite a pair,” Jack said, making it an enormous compliment.
“It hasn’t all been bad for him, though.”
“I know. Or he wouldn’t want to go back, no matter what he thinks would happen to him here.”
They sat quietly for a few minutes, and then Aeryn said, “I met you once, you know. In a way. You were kind to us.”
Jack looked at her quizzically.
“About 3 cycles ago,” she began, and then amended, “three years ago, a very powerful race created the image of a wormhole and what looked like this planet. They filled it with people from John’s mind, including you, and lured John in. D’Argo, Rygel and I went after him. It wasn’t very pleasant,” she said, pausing. “They made us think the humans killed Rygel just to study him, and they said they sent D’Argo away to do the same thing to him. John and I escaped and ran. I was very bitter.” She smiled apologetically.
“Why would an advanced race do that?” Jack asked, perplexed.
“They were looking for a world to share, and wanted to see how humans would react if they came here. John’s fears frightened them away from Earth.” She shook her head. “But, you helped us. You went out of your way to protect us, even though you thought you would never see John again. He always tells me it wasn’t really you – but meeting you now, I think it was near enough. It hurt him, knowing they’d used his memories of you….”
“It’s nice to know he thinks that well of me. Thank you for telling me that.”
Aeryn smiled and then added as an afterthought, “Actually, these are the aliens who gave John the wormhole knowledge that Scorpius wanted. If we’d never met them, things might have been very different.”
Jack murmured something incomprehensible, and then added, “We have to play the hand we’re dealt. John understands that.”
Somehow that made more sense than it should have, and Aeryn smiled.
After a moment, she got up and walked over to the wall, reaching her hands out to touch one of the pictures Jack had been looking at when she entered the room. It seemed to be a younger version of John’s father, with a woman of about the same age. They were both smiling.
“This is John’s mother?” she asked.
“Yes. When we were first married.” He smiled.
“She’s very beautiful.”
“Yes. Yes she was.” His eyes slid fondly over the other pictures, including lots of photos of John.
“And these are all John?” Aeryn asked.
“And his sisters, in some of them.”
“Doesn’t it hurt?”
He looked at her, puzzled.
“To be reminded of your loss.” When he still seemed unsure what she meant, she added, “Until today you thought John was dead, and you lost your wife before that. And still you have all these pictures, here,” she gestured around the room with her hand, “where you see them every day. I don’t think I would want to be reminded of it if I lost John.”
Jack smiled. “No, it doesn’t hurt. It helps. It doesn’t just remind me they’re gone, but it also reminds me of everything that we had together. These pictures remind me of who John was, everything he did, in the time I had him in my life. And Leslie, well, she put up with a lot in the time we had together. Being an astronaut’s wife wasn’t exactly easy, especially in those days. She was my rock, she kept the family running.”
“John never talks about her.”
“Doesn’t he? Well, it hit him hard when she died. He just didn’t want to believe she wasn’t going to get well, and he couldn’t bring himself to see her so ill.”
As curious as she was about John and his mother, it seemed like a betrayal to ask about it behind his back, and she changed the subject abruptly. “Tell me about some of these pictures,” she said, gesturing around the room.
“Oh, let me see,” Jack said, getting up and walking over to the bookshelf. Aeryn followed after him. He picked up a photo taken outdoors in the wild. There was a body of water behind the family group, and a gawky-looking John was standing with his arm around his mother’s shoulder, grinning. “This is a vacation at Sawyer’s Mill.” He smiled. “It was the last trip we all went on, just before John started college. We had to squeeze it in around all the commitments everyone had. The kids were really growing up. I remember John mostly complained because he missed his girlfriend. But it was still a really good trip. We hiked, we fished. Leslie caught the biggest trout and John gutted it for her.”
Aeryn recognized the name of the lake. It was interesting to put a mental image together with the words from one of John’s endless stories. The longer she was on this planet, the more she was glad she had come. It made his past so much more real to her.
Aeryn pointed to a picture of John wearing a bulky bright-colored suit and holding a helmet and asked in horror, “That’s not a flight suit, is it?”
“What? Oh, no, that’s a football uniform. Football. John played in high school. It’s a rough sport. That’s protective clothing.”
“Football!” she remembered. “Where you run with the ball and the other team jumps on you and breaks your leg.”
Jack laughed. “Something like that,” he said. “I must remember to speak to your husband about your education!”
Aeryn looked at him for a moment, puzzled, but he seemed to be amused rather than serious, so she went back to looking at photos.
“That’s John’s module,” Aeryn realized, pointing at a picture that she recognized was of John, DK and his father, with the Farscape I in the background.
“Uh-huh. The last picture I had of John. It was taken during mission training.” Jack looked at it sadly. “That one,” he admitted, “hurt. But I couldn’t let it go. John put everything he had into that project. It was his life back then, even if it killed him.”
Aeryn resolved then and there to suggest to John that they find some way to leave some images of their visit behind with his father – and to take some away for John.
In the center of the wall were large portraits of John and his sisters wearing robes and odd flat square hats. Jack told Aeryn they were college graduation portraits, meaning they had all been taken at about the same age. Aeryn studied the faces of the siblings. She’d never seen a Sebacean sibling group. She could see bits of John in his sisters’ faces. It was an eerie experience. It made her wonder about heredity.
“Did John look like you did, when you were a child?”
“Oh, a little. He always looked more like his mother. There are more pictures of John around in an album, I think. Do you want to see them?”
“Yes. I’d like that.”
Jack walked over to a shelf, studied it for a moment, and pulled out a photo album. “Leslie took a lot of photos, but we never really got things organized. This is the only album we’ve actually got with pictures in it, and it’s mostly of John when he was very young. Everything else is in boxes.”
“That’s fine,” Aeryn told him. “Anything will be lovely.” She sat cross-legged on the sofa with the book in her lap, turning pages slowly and trying to see the man she knew in the faces of the little boy in the pictures. Eating, laughing, running, reaching for a flower, pointing a gun at the sky (a toy, she could only assume, given what she knew of human child-rearing practices), swimming in a pool of water, reaching his arms up to his father…. He was beautiful. She ran her finger over one of the pictures. “He laughs like that now,” she said.
“Good,” Jack told her. He looked over her shoulder as Aeryn finished with the photos. “He was a happy little guy, and so curious. Always into everything.”
“Well, that last hasn’t changed,” she remarked, handing him the album back. “Thank you.”
“You have no idea what it means to me to be able to show you that,” he said. “After the accident, I had to give up all the ideas I’d had about John’s future, seeing him marry, sharing those photos with his wife, seeing his children….”
Aeryn found herself blushing.
“Well, I won’t nag you about the grandchildren. Always hated parents who did that! It’s enough to know he’s got someone who loves him.”
They lapsed into silence again for a while until Jack announced, “I still can’t believe he’s upstairs right now, asleep, in my house.” He shook his head. “When John was a baby, I used to go into his room at night and just stand there over him, watching him sleep. Watching him breathe.” He looked up at Aeryn ruefully. “If he was alone tonight, that’s where I would have been when you came down here a little while ago. Standing in the doorway, watching him sleep.”
“That’s extraordinary,” Aeryn said slowly. “My life couldn’t have been more different from John’s. I was born on a command carrier and raised to be a soldier. I was taught that emotional attachments were wrong. But one day, when I was very small, I woke up in my dormitory, and my mother was standing over me. She risked everything to see me.” She paused to let the later memories wash over her and be gone.
Jack sensed the story didn’t have a happy ending, but already he knew this wasn’t a woman you should try to push to talk. She’d say what she wanted to. He simply said, “There are few things stronger than a parent’s love.”
Parental love doesn’t exist in the Peacekeepers, Aeryn thought. It was part of what made her reluctant to conceive a child with John. Even though her mother’s midnight visit had begun her journey towards freedom from the Peacekeepers, Aeryn had still been bred in the Peacekeeper way. Could she love a child the way John would, the way Jack did?
Yes, she realized. She could. “My mother loved me,” she said. She’d felt it as a child, and she’d known it was still true when she was faced with the woman her mother had become. It wasn’t really a revelation. But when she added it to her bond with Moya’s child, her love for John, the empathy she felt now for his father, her fascination tonight with the child John had been, she thought she was indeed able to give the kind of love she wanted for her child, for John’s child. Of course, John was going to have to do the hands-on childcare….what did she know about infants?
She smiled enigmatically at Jack. “I don’t need to go upstairs right away. I’d like to look at those pictures again. Would you like to go watch John breathe?”
Jack smiled back. “Yes. Yes I would.”
